Putin ‘cherrypicking’ facts when he blames Poland for helping to start WWII, historians say

Russia and Poland remain embroiled in a dispute over who is to blame for the outbreak of the Second World War— as the 75th anniversary of the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz approaches — with no end in sight.

“The words of Vladimir Putin are a complete distortion of historical truth. We give it a very direct name, it is an ideology, it is a kind of post-Stalinist revisionism,” Duda told the Financial Times. “Some claim that this is propaganda-based hybrid warfare…. Some experts claim that Putin’s words are used for the purpose of internal propaganda. For us, it doesn’t make a difference. For us, what matters is that this historical lie is being spread around the world.

Experts denounced Putin’s speech as a “cherry-picking” of historical events, selecting certain historical facts to support a certain narrative and repeating them without the necessary context. “The Soviet Union was trying to the utmost to use every opportunity for establishing an anti-Hitler coalition, held talks with military representatives of France and Great Britain, thus attempting to prevent the outbreak of World War II, but it practically remained alone and isolated,” reads a transcript of the speech posted online by the Kremlin.

“It wasn’t exclusively from a point of weakness,” he said. “In the spirit of talking about documents, he omits that there are documents in the Soviet archive mined years ago that showed that Stalin had an invasion plan for Germany … but it wasn’t ready yet.” Putin also left out a chunk of the Soviet Union’s history with Germany, showing that the two regimes collaborated well before Hitler arrived on scene.

“Even Wikipedia mentions this, so I wonder why Putin didn’t look it up, when everyone else does,” Kislenko joked. “It’s a one-sided story,” said Norman Naimark, who teaches Eastern European history at Stanford University. “Everything he says in some way is right but it’s just not the full story and that’s the problem with history. There’s nothing wrong with the documents he picks, they’re all the right documents but then all the other documents are gone.”

Yet, “the idea that it conspired and was part of the Germany war machine and knowingly and consciously was doing so to oppose the Soviet Union needs to be contextualized,” he added.

Revisionist history at its finest.

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